i don’t defend targeted ads since they are bad (i use uBlock)
but what monetization system is a bit more ethical than targeted ads but can last unlike donations
how would you solve that issue
My Opinion
well it is make that there are version which you own but if you pay for 1 the one after it you pay again for that new version but with a small discount
Probably a lot more subscription based stuff. People don’t flinch about spending $50-$100 on their phone subscription but email, which is equally important, people expect it to be free from places like Google.
I don’t want to be that person and bring up this argument which isn’t answering your question but does big tech need to be funded? There is great open source alternatives to most big tech which are either ran by volunteers or funded by donation. They would be so much better supported if big tech alternatives did not exist.
Big tech selling hardware would still be funded that way. Apple, Lenovo, etc etc would be similarly funded. Microsoft sells licenses to their operating system.
I would argue the world would be a much better place if big tech wasn’t funded and open source projects were king.
The code might be open source, but the infrastructure it runs on needs to be paid for somehow
Yep. I took OP’s question to be about big tech. If business isn’t using it, you can’t get too big.
Look at MS and all the people around here predicting their downfall because they personally switched to Linux and the Xbox division is suffering. Y’all, 85-90% of Microsoft’s profits are corporate Windows and Office. The rest is fluff. LOL, they long ago dropped resistance to pirating and I’ve paid them zero pennies over 30-years of using Windows for personal use.
On infra though, we sysadmins had predicted another wave of business bringing compute and storage back inhouse. Despite the stunning charges from AWS and the like, that doesn’t look to ever happen. Wierd.
An individual switching is certainly ineffective, but if the switch affects other people in their household, especially children, then they will grow up knowing that there’s a better alternative out there and potentially bring that to their workplace, especially in smaller companies. And it doesn’t have to be a complete replacement at the workplace to start with either; it could be the adoption of a standard that doesn’t require the use of big tech products, where people can use open products that support the open format.
This line of thinking is why big tech has a strong interest in putting their products into schools, as it shapes the expectations of schoolchildren of what tools are available.